Mainstream reaction to our new book, Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran,
underscores some important realities about America’s Iran debate—and
about the political and cultural obstacles to truly constructive change
in American foreign policy. Flynt addressed this point last week on
“The Monitor,” a news analysis program hosted by Mark Bebawi and Otis
McClay for KPFT, Pacifica Radio’s Houston station. (To listen to the
interview, click here;
Flynt is the second half of the program, so those who want to go
directly to him should scroll forward to just slightly past the halfway
mark.)

In his first question, Mark Bebawi underscores that both of us are
people who have spent “a lot of time in the institutions of power,” with
connections to “all sorts of fairly well respected within the
mainstream” organizations (e.g., the Council on Foreign Relations, the
International Institute for Strategic Studies, and, at various points,
prominent Washington think tanks). He commends Going to Tehran as “full of logical thinking based on history.” He notes, though, that because the book’s analyses and arguments are “going against the tide,” mainstream reaction to Going to Tehran is “full of all sorts of accusations about what your motives might be” for having written it—including “everything from accusations of being agents of the Iranian government to being a disgruntled employee.” Flynt responds,

“We are taking on a very well entrenched mythology about
Iran—about its foreign policy, about its internal politics, about how
the United States deals with it. Particularly in the post-Cold War
era, America has embraced some very, very dangerous mythologies about
different parts of the world, about America’s role in the world—I think
that’s an important part of how we got into the terrible blunder and
crime of the Iraq War.

My wife and I watched that one from the inside, when all the
institutions that Americans are supposed to rely on to push back against
bad policy ideas, against bad analysis, against bad
arguments—institutions like Congress, media, think tanks, public
intellectuals—with a few honorable and courageous exceptions, those
institutions basically rolled over for the executive branch. And we
were determined that, this time around, someone was going to ask the
hard questions, make the kind of countervailing arguments that should
have been made before the Iraq invasion, but weren’t.